Maajid Nawaz on the Misguided Nature of the War on Terror

But yeah, these guys, I attempted for about 10 years, through my then organization, Quilliam, to attempt to, pretty much has happened to me on the Islamist side, to attempt to try and soften some of that hard edge of the war and terror. How was that met with Bush? He was charming, but of course it wasn't ever going to be Bush, it was going to be the people around him. Right. What was his perspective on what you're saying now? The last two years of the Bush presidency, I think they really began getting to grips with some of this. And again, that's not a popular thing to say. And I remember the time, those last two years, they began realizing that this has to be more of an ideological and intellectual conversation and not a physical war. You can't win. Right. Right? In this war, there was no way anyone was going to win. And so they were stuck in this situation where it was many years deep into the war and realizing that they had done everything that they were trying to avoid. We had had that one desert storm war, and I think people had come under the impression that if we were to invade a country, it would be very quick and very easy. We had this very American centric idea of what would go on in a war. And because of that, it made us so much more willing to enter into war. It's insane. It's insane. If a foreign army occupied America, would you just sit back and let them stay here for 10? I mean, come on. This is so, is going to sit there and watch a foreign army in their, if anyone invaded Britain, I'd be the first to say, sign me up. Where do I join? No one is just going to let foreign troops in their land. But this madness was brought about because back in those days, Bush didn't even know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims. It was just pure ignorance that the foreign policy neoconservative machine was hoodwinked by this guy called Chalabi in Iraq, who convinced them that if you invade, everything's going to be hunky dory. Iraq is going to blossom into this democracy. All that ended up happening is 60% of Iraq was Shia. You end up creating this satellite of sphere of influence for Iran because Iran is Shia origin country and it ended up having this disproportionate influence in Iraq as a result. And you end up with a situation today. I mean, it's a mess. When you think back to this man trying to convince the Bush administration that everything was going to be fine, it was going to blossom into a democracy. What do you think was his motivation? Do you think ultimately he knew that the Shia and the Sunni would go to battle and there would be a massive conflict and that it would destabilize the region? Do you think he was aware of that or do you think they were operating on ignorance or do you think they were operating under this premise that they were going to get to control the natural resources and it was worth it financially and they would sort it all out? Well, individual intentions aside, if you look to Cheney, if you look to Rumsfeld and if you look at this guy, Chalabi, who was from the Iraqi National Congress and if you look at everything that happened since then and the behavior in Iraq and beyond, it's definitely not about bringing democracy. Now the Jew is out for me. Is it oil? Is it natural resources? Is it strategic positioning? It's definitely not the reason that we were told and it certainly wasn't weapons of mass destruction. That was all built on a lie and that's also come out since the dossier. Do you think they knew about the lie for sure? How many people do you think knew about ... like when they were broadcasting on CNN, weapons of mass destruction, we have to invade Iraq. Who do you think knew that that was not true? Remember Colin Powell? Yes. I'm quite sure he knew he was speaking bullshit. God, that's so hard to believe. That's so hard to believe because he's so admired and when you have an example of a man who is a distinguished military career and then goes on to be a distinguished politician, he's one of the best examples we've ever had. But you remember he was opposed to it for a long time and then he gave that one speech. I think it was at the UN. And I think that's the point that he knew what was going. He was opposed to it. He didn't want to follow this. He had a vial of something. And then somebody gave him something and then he said, all right. And I think when he did that speech, I think he knew in his heart something's not right. What was the vial? What did he have? I can't remember but it was used as evidence. What we've had since in the UK is an inquiry and they found that Tony Blair pretty much they all knew that something wasn't right with his intelligence they were given. And this 15 minutes thing, it just wasn't right. And the guy that exposed it, one of our scientists in the UK. 15 minutes thing? Saddam can strike within 15 minutes. And there's a guy who, in particular with the weapons of mass destruction. Now again, caveat, Saddam is no picnic. I mean, a man has gassed his own people. He's the Iraqi equivalent of Mubarak that did what he did to us in Egypt. And his sons were the most evil. I mean, again, people think I'm going to defend. This isn't about defending Saddam. This is true. The first death in our organization, my former group was in Iraq. One of our members was tortured to death by Saddam. We were attempting to overthrow Saddam too. Right? So this is no favoritism to Saddam Hussein coming from me. What I'm saying is that you don't go in into war based on a lie. And this guy called Dr. Kelly in the UK, he was the scientist from our whatever, our defense sector who exposed this lie. He turned out dead a couple of weeks later. No one knows what happened to him, but he's dead. So it's just all weird, right? But looking- Died of what? They found him dead in his car. I think it's officially suicide, whatever. Who knows? Yeah. I don't know. Was Epstein suicide? I don't know. I say no. What do you say? Doesn't look like he does it. I get very uncomfortable when people say he did commit suicide. That's a bit weird, isn't it? Well, I started asking them questions. Why do you think that? Like did you look at the autopsy? Did you ever hear Michael Baden speak about it, where he talks about the ligature marks at the bottom of his neck, which indicate he was strangled? Did you hear about the broken bones, rather, in his neck? Like that don't exist normally when people hang themselves. They usually are only from someone being strangled. There's a desire, the camera thing, the security guards conveniently sleeping. There's so much. It's all strange. But it's in front of everybody's face. Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. Tada. And you're like, holy shit. If the lie is big enough, right? This is a good one, though. I mean, it's quite extraordinary that they were able to pull that off. They were able to pull that off in front of everyone's eyes. Well, I mean, I don't know if they've pulled it off. I'm not so sure people deep down really, really, truly believe that that's... I mean, everyone, I think, realizes it's more than meets the eye with that. Yeah, I think so, too. People don't want to speak about it. But it's gone on long enough that I think it's going to be a part of the past. And people are just going to go, what happened to him? Who knows? What happened to Kennedy? Who knows? Like I just said with Dr. Kelly, right? Yes. Who knows? Who knows? But what we have learned from that is that it's easy to manufacture consent around something that isn't true for foreign policy purposes. It was done with Iraq. And my whole thing was, how do we stop that happening again? That's what I was trying to do. With Bush? With all of them. But when you were... All the way through to Cameron. What kind of dialogue did you have with Bush in terms of trying to convince him to take a different approach? Well, so as I say, in his last two years, they were listening. So I met with Secretary Chertoff, who founded the Homeland Security. He used to be a judge. And we would work very closely with Homeland Security and that entire group. And what happened was, if you recall, so those last two years, then Obama got elected. And as always, just as we felt we were beginning to make progress, I mean, one of my bugbears has long been, we have to shut Guantanamo Bay down. This idea that we can throw people in jail for years and years and years over decades with no charge, right? It started with jihadi prisoners. You move to Syria, it moved from jihadi prisoners to their wives and their children now. So there's just been a jailbreak in Syria, an ISIS-attempted jailbreak. Now there's a bit of detail to that story that's more interesting than the fact that ISIS in the first organized attack for many years since the fall of their so-called Islamic State have demonstrated that they've regrouped because they had a full frontal assault on this jail. But that's not what interests me. And I think that the Kurdish forces have retaken it just yesterday. What interests me is the detail in this little story. And that is that it turns out that there were hundreds of children in this jail, children born to ISIS fighters who nobody wanted to take care of, so they threw them in this adult jihadi prison, hundreds of children, some of whom died in this attempted jailbreak. So we've gone from, and this is where when the Overton window shifts in that way, when you think, oh, Bush's years, if only, our value system has shifted so much to a point, we are now living with this idea that our states and our allies can throw children in jail for years with some of the most dangerous people on the planet. And it went from jihadis in Guantanamo to, in Syria now, to their wives and children, including by the way, Western citizens. So this jailbreak, some of the kids that were killed, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, Western citizens, Australians, and others, American as an American kid, in The Times newspaper. And why were they in the prison? Because they were taken there as kids by their jihadi parents. And nobody wants to do, no Western government, credit to America, under Trump, you guys took back all your foreign fighters from ISIS. Britain hasn't done so, nor have most European- Took back all our foreign fighters. Who were Americans who went to join ISIS, yeah. They're now back in the, yeah, they're back in, you know, you bring them back and if there's a crime to answer for, you put them on trial. But what you haven't done, what America hasn't done is say, you know what, I don't give a damn, they might be American, but they can stay in Syria. And even if they're sentenced in Syria, say they finish their time, where do they go? Right. So that's what's happened is nobody, so there's camps, there are entire camps, they're just internship camps, concentration camps or intern camps, like al-Haul, camp al-Haul in Syria, where there's women and children, kids from babies, and they're growing up and they're giving birth in these prisons and they're just, no one's charged them or convicted them of anything. They're essentially being raised in these prisons. They are born and raised in prisons. Jesus Christ. Now you go from Guantanamo to that, and I'm going to bring you to another stage, right? We're talking about the Overton window of acceptability shifting. We've got a home secretary in the UK right now called Priti Patel. She then suggested that, what do you do with these boat people that come over from France and they're trying to cross the English Channel, undocumented migrants, they're landing in Britain. What do you do with them? She said, oh, I know what we can do with them. Arrest them and then put them in a camp in Rwanda. So you've gone from, we've gone from arbitrarily interning jihadis to arbitrarily interning their wives and their children to now arbitrarily interning anyone who's undocumented in these camps. That's not the kind of world I want to see going forward. It's like that movie, Elysium, right? Yes. That's not the kind of world I want to see going forward. So this is the kind of thing that I was upset with in that machine. And I'm trying to work in the machine to say, what you guys are doing is making the problem worse with this kind of behavior. Power, brute force does not fix your problems. And these conversations with Bush in particular, like what was that like? How did he respond to this? So Bush was one meeting and after that one meeting, I was able to speak to the administration. And as I say, so for the last two years, I felt, we felt we were beginning to make progress. Obama gets in and then they want to reinvent the wheel. And a lot of people, when they look at Obama, they think a great president. Again, I'm not going to mince my words and I don't want anyone to say, I see majid is this or that. Guys, I'm going to understand. I didn't even come from this system. I wanted to overthrow the whole thing. Obama and Bush together. I was anti-democracy full stop. So this is not about me supporting Bush, supporting Obama, supporting Trump, supporting anyone. I'm looking at this from the outside and seeing what's going wrong vis-a-vis this specific debate. Yeah. And speaking objectively about it, regardless of whether you're left wing or right wing. So Obama comes in and this man launches more drone strikes than Bush, has a kill list, which Bush never had. That is unaccountable. That kill list he made, including American citizens, was not accountable to Congress. So on the physical war side, he basically did even more than Bush did. With his assassinations, with his NSA spying, with his military approach to solving problems, with his drones, more drone strikes than Bush ever conducted. He just ratcheted up the military side of this. And we were then, when Obama became president, my work was for a long time ostracized from the Obama administration because of this point. And then where he should have done something like the rise of ISIS, completely useless. So your work was ostracized because you were working towards peace and a less brutal approach, and he was conducting drone strikes and NSA surveillance. They didn't want to hear what I was going to say to you. They just didn't want to hear that. They didn't want to hear it. But they knew your position. And did you eventually get to meet with him? Not him. Not him. I met Hillary Clinton. I met Madeleine Albright. But I didn't meet Obama. Did you ever meet anybody? They smelled like sulfur. What? Any of those people? What? They're like, they're evil. This is an evil person. This is for sure straight from hell. So anyway, I went to- Just fucking around. Yeah, no, no, it's good doctor. But you met Hillary Clinton. You met George Bush. Who else did you meet inside the organization? On the US side, Madeleine Albright, Secretary Shirtshoff, when he was head of the Homeland Security Department. Was any one group or one administration more open to your ideas? Well, the same thing happened. It's usually the case, right? It takes six years. The last two years of the Obama administration, like the last two years of Bush, they began listening to us. And then of course, Biden- sorry, Trump comes in.